For modern businesses, it is often critical that widely scattered locations be able to work from a common set of data. For example, if a company has design teams in multiple locations working on a new product or process, it is necessary for each design team to have up to date versions of the documents for the new products or processes, so that they can see any changes that other design teams have made. One approach to handling this requirement is to establish point to point connections between each of the remote locations. In this approach, whenever a designer at one location makes a change, the changed document can be sent to all of the other locations through their dedicated connections. However, the number of connections (and therefore cost) required to maintain and use this type of network increases very quickly as a function of the number of remote locations. Similarly, the bandwidth required to send each changed file to each of the remote locations can be significant. Other approaches, such as maintaining central document repositories, have been tried, but these approaches have also been found to be problematic, typically due to high bandwidth consumption. Accordingly, prior to the development of the inventors' technology, there has been a need in the art for improved technology which can effectively replicate data between remote sites.